Can an online library of classic video games ever be legal?
Can an online library of classic video games ever be legal?
Preservationists propose access limits, but industry worries about a free "online arcade."
Probably, in the same way Steamboat Mickey is.
Just part of the whole valuing property, in this case intellectual, over actual labor and people that our species loves so fucking much.
Imagine if IP from drugs to technology to fiction had a 5-10 year max window before other people could work with and expand on it. It would be a better world for most.
Oh you only get to make exclusive income on that thing you came up with for SEVERAL YEARS OF YOUR LIFE before you need to contribute in other ways to keep making money, boo fucking hoo. Where's the sympathy for people working 2 jobs, burning their life up to meet basic needs, who don't get several years of passive income on an idea that popped into their head 4 years ago.
Drugs do use patents with reasonable time limits.
For some reason they are allowed to make miniscule changes and get new patents, but the old ways are then available for generics.
It would be great if copyright switched back to reasonable time limits. Media companies would still live on as repositories that could sell access to high quality source copies and remasters to make income. They would only lose the control over other people using what is already in the public domain.
Exactly - the poor and working class are constantly told they need to evolve to keep up, why shouldn't that apply to rich people too?
Ethically, it should apply. In practice, it doesn’t because the rich make the rules.
I don’t understand why these legacy game license owners don’t start licensing out their old games on the cheap to game services like Apple Arcade or Steam to get extra revenue on them. They learned that lesson in video streaming and it gave a ton of mostly dead IP new life.
Video games were such a wild west back in the 80s and 90s that it's often not clear who even owns the copyright anymore.
There is a lot of abandonware and stuff where the companies just dissolved and ownership of any IP is questionable at best.
But also I don't think there's a way to give Nintendo/Game Freak money to play Gen 1 Pokemon at the moment? There's plenty of stuff like that. Sega and SquareEnix and some others have done a decent job of licensing/re-releasing some games. But there's plenty out there that they 'could' release and seemingly have no interest.
Well in that case, there's nobody to sue!
And ironically when they do offer it, it's always an unplayable buggy mess. For example, Saints Row 2 (2009) on steam appears completely unplayable judging by recent reviews, it crashes to desktop when a mission ends, and they're selling it on sale.
They should just do what Realms of the Haunting 1996 for MS-DOS did and package the whole thing inside of an Emulator.
It's because of how shit saints row 2 and gta 4 are on PC that I use my Xbox to play Xbox 360 games.
That's a great frickin idea...never crossed my mind
Cause selling new games is more profitable.
If a new games costs €60 and older games €5 or less (which would be a lot less on streaming services), they'd have to sell at least 12 old games for every new game they sell less cause of this change. And if gamers spend more time on older games, it's highly possible that they'd buy, even just a single game, less.
It's the same with movies or TV. They would only loose money if they make the whole archive available as there is just so much of it that some of the new things could become irrelevant.
Not that I'm against archiving, but it is caused by the creative sector having to have to make money, which isn't easy for smaller players, and greed.
The old games are already made and the new ones are yet to be made.
So one has costs to come out of the profits. The other doesn’t.
I don’t understand your argument.
Because there's a chance Sintendo will release another port of that one obscure NES game that absolutely nobody is buying their online service for on their next Gen console. If they license any of their games, how can they rape the consumer financially? Can't you think of the hungry employees at this small indie company that is going bankrupt because little 5 year old Timmy downloaded a copy of a game on N64 Sintendo doesn't even have the rights to anymore?
/S
Explicitly yes. Archiving is absolutely 100% legal and anybody who says otherwise is an idiot.
In the US or Germany: Straight to jail
In Japan: Your organs are now the property of Nintendo to repay this heinous crime.
Rest of the world: it depends.
It can, if some laws are changed. Which is possible, although the largest video game producers will probably raise hell to not release any control they have.
Not as long as copyright holders believe it is better to sit on a property unused than sllow it to expose future generations to the technologies that gave birth to their current way of life
I thought there was a site that let at most x number of people play games where x is the number of physical copies the site creator had on hand for that game. The industry doesn't like this either, but the industry can go fuck itself. They've already practically taken away the public domain by making the period for copyright expiration too damn long.
Yeah it could be since copyrights have an expiration date before the thing becomes public domain. In order for, say, E.T. for Atari for become public domain, Howard Scott Warshaw would have to die and then 70 years later the copyright on E.T. would end. And that's assuming HSW maintained the copyright himself, and isn't held by Atari. I don't know how it works in the case of a company that can't technically die. If it just becomes 70 years and the author's life has no bearing on it, then it still would be 28 years until Atari's E.T. is public domain.
The length of time, IMO, should be shortened to just life of author+5-10 years.
Imo it should be shortened to hard 15-30 years regardless of life or author.
Disney might boeing you if you keep up with this nasty attitude lol
They spent good money on this.
That's never going to happen. Sony, Nintendo and Sega would all throw millions to stop that.
When it comes to works for hire like most commercial games, the term is 95 years after publication, or 120 years after creation, whichever comes first. In another 50 years or so, you can legally fall down all the holes.
I guess Antstream is kind of such a library? (Just answering the question in the headline. I haven’t read the article.)
After the expiry of the copyright i assume.
Depends if it can go into public domain, I have no knowledge on copyright law so Im just guessing
If copyright law is involved then you're looking at 70 years after the author's death or 95 years depending on which expires first for it to be public domain and only the original iteration is released into the public domain. That's for the USA and different countries have different laws and I'd imagine that would complicate things massively as an online library would have to be compliant with various laws of different countries
So take Mickey Mouse for example he's now in the public domain but only in his original form in the Steamboat Willie cartoon, anything that uses something more recent than that like his red shorts for example would be taken down.
Maybe ever, but currently...?
